Webmail Startup Will Pay Users To Receive Spam

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Startup Affini launched a free email service on Wednesday that will eventually pay users to receive advertisements.

Initially, the service will work similarly to other “whitelist” email services such as Mailblocks, which allows members to pick and choose who they want to correspond with. In a few weeks, however, Affini will charge companies about 15 cents each to send advertisements to users, who will be able to opt in to the service.

Eventually, the company plans to turn the site into more of a portal, complete with search and community capabilities, said founder William Chang, who created the Ultraseek search engine for Infoseek and served as chief technology officer for the Infoseek/GO Network site. Chang said a version of Affini’s search engine has already been licensed to a Chinese web portal. In early 2005, Affini will add group building capabilities and improved search functionality.

The idea of paying for spam has circulated for years, prompting strategies designed by independent consultants as well as IBM’s research team. Most have used some sort of authorized whitelist to determine legitimate emailers, and then offered some form of a token or cash payment to let advertisers into the system.

Affini’s model will start off as a token model. The tokens will be exchangeable for cash at a later date, in what Chang said would be a matter of weeks. At the launch, users will receive 1,000 points just for signing up, worth about $10 during the cash conversion, he said.

Affini also is making available a “butler” program to help apply the Affini technology to a user’s current email address and software.

A user can block all spam, or opt in to the payment system. Affini members won’t pay to send messages, but will have the right to charge a fee for receiving a message from anybody outside the network  individual or commercial sender alike. If the recipient so chooses, he can waive the fee and also invite the sender into the network. At some point, Affini will allow users to alter the initial fee, allowing them to charge a dollar, for example, to receive unsolicited mail. However, market forces will also limit the number of advertisers who will want to pay such rates, Chang noted.

“We need to keep the barriers low initially so we can attract users into the network,” Chang said. The Affini network is prepared for up to a million users, Chang said, and will add more capacity as needed. To attract advertisers  and pay users money  the site must first attract a large user base, he said.

“The price for Google ads is 40 cents and rising,” Chang said, citing the cost of a thousand “impressions” on a user’s web page. “The way we look at it, 15 cents is a good baseline. This isn’t a fraction of a penny. This is real. It has to be.”

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